“I’ll tell!” she said. “My father used to be caretaker for Mr. Scott before he died. When the son closed up the house, he told father he would not need him any longer; but he wanted him to keep an eye on the place, and he would pay him for doing it. So he let father keep the set of keys he had always had.
“So father was out of work. My mother is dead, and we’re pretty poor. I have an older brother, but he was never able to keep a job long. Until prohibition—then he started boot-legging and made lots of money. He worked on father to let him make the stuff back there in the Scott’s stable. Father held out for a while; he didn’t want to do it, but he needed the money; so he finally gave in. He could work around the place, and nobody in the neighborhood would suspect anything, because they thought he was still caretaker here.
“My brother made a good business of it; the people he sold it to would come in the middle of the night and stop their machines there in the road; and Tom—that’s my brother—Tom would give them the stuff he made. He fixed it up with the policemen on this beat, who were friends of his.
“Everything went fine for awhile, and we made lots of money. Then you came and opened a tea-house. My brother was back in the stable the first day you came in. When he saw you there the second time, he was sure you was going to rent the house; so that night he moved all the things he had there—”
“Then nothing really did happen to you—the way you said—the night you stayed here with your aunt?” interrupted Jack.
“No. That was all made up. It was Tom’s idea for me to have the party, and he thought it was a pretty smart plan; because it gave me an excuse for staying here all night—with Aunt Mary, too, who really didn’t know what was going on.”
“Anna, you’re a selfish, unfeeling girl!” cried Marjorie. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for scaring your aunt and all of us that way?”
“But we had to do it, Miss Marjorie!” argued Anna. “Tom didn’t have any place to carry on his business, and he was losing all his trade while you stayed here. And instead of frightening you away that first time, it only brought you more business....”
“So you tried it again,” said Jack.
“Yes. We knew that you had heard about the place being haunted, and Tom had an idea that if we kept it up long enough, and some of you girls heard the ghost in the house, we’d scare you away. So every time any girls stayed at night, he tried to frighten them—”